Should I Quit College To Become A Better Screenwriter?

00:00:00.000 | So what do we got? What's our first question, Jesse?

00:00:02.300 | Hi, the first question is from Julian.

00:00:04.640 | Julian says, I intend in university for a brief period

00:00:08.780 | to get a degree in film, but dropped out.

00:00:11.180 | I want to be a screenwriter,

00:00:12.300 | but I currently work in the service industry.

00:00:14.140 | So my days can be long and tiresome.

00:00:16.800 | At 20 years old, I feel incredibly behind in my writing.

00:00:20.080 | Was dropping out of university a bad decision?

00:00:23.080 | Well, Julian, first of all, I think dropping out or not dropping out.

00:00:28.380 | This is a red herring when it comes to the specific question of screenwriting

00:00:32.880 | and jumpstarting your screenwriting career.

00:00:35.540 | I think there's a lot to be discussed about dropping out of college,

00:00:38.480 | whether you should or shouldn't.

00:00:40.640 | But I don't think it really matters either way, good or bad.

00:00:44.500 | When it comes to this very specific question of

00:00:47.200 | are you behind in your screenwriting career and what would you need to do?

00:00:51.500 | So I'm not a screenwriter myself.

00:00:54.980 | I don't have a specific background in it.

00:00:57.300 | I am a big fan of movies.

00:00:58.700 | I am a big fan of the movie industry. I know screenwriters.

00:01:01.200 | I'm going to try to pull together from stuff

00:01:03.540 | I have learned to try to offer you some advice here.

00:01:06.040 | I have two things to recommend, Julian.

00:01:10.040 | One, surround yourself.

00:01:12.840 | By other artists.

00:01:14.940 | I think this is critical in the movie industry,

00:01:17.340 | particularly if you're going to be a screenwriter, you have to be around

00:01:21.400 | other people with high artistic aspirations in this field.

00:01:27.380 | If you're trying to do this in isolation,

00:01:29.480 | this how do I write a movie that gets made?

00:01:31.880 | You're going to produce things that are formulaic.

00:01:34.580 | You're not going to find traction.

00:01:35.880 | You have to aim incredibly high and be around people

00:01:38.340 | who are really pushing themselves.

00:01:39.980 | You see this again and again.

00:01:41.820 | When you look back through the personal stories, in particular of directors

00:01:45.080 | or director writers that that really break out.

00:01:47.420 | They're surrounded by other

00:01:50.580 | aspirational film industry types.

00:01:52.840 | They're pushing each other.

00:01:53.720 | They're learning from each other.

00:01:55.580 | They have big aims.

00:01:57.020 | I'm just reading right now a Francis Ford Coppola

00:01:59.240 | or Coppola, Coppola, Coppola

00:02:02.740 | biography and about that generation of filmmakers.

00:02:06.420 | They came from various places, but they were all with each other.

00:02:11.120 | So he had George Lucas.

00:02:12.680 | They were very he was very close with George Lucas.

00:02:14.840 | And then that crew met up with the USC crew.

00:02:18.720 | So you had, you know, Scorsese.

00:02:20.880 | You had Brian De Palma.

00:02:22.640 | Then they connected with Spielberg, who didn't didn't get in the USC,

00:02:27.580 | but also had a deal with Universal at, you know, 19.

00:02:31.540 | So it didn't really matter.

00:02:32.340 | So it's Spielberg at the Palma.

00:02:33.780 | You have Scorsese, Coppola.

00:02:35.880 | You had Lucas.

00:02:36.900 | They're all hanging out and pushing each other and

00:02:40.040 | working with each other.

00:02:41.940 | And out of that came, you know, really interesting,

00:02:45.080 | really interesting work.

00:02:46.980 | JJ Abrams has a sort of interesting similar story.

00:02:50.480 | So surround yourself by other artists, people who are obsessed with this.

00:02:53.420 | I just went down a

00:02:56.480 | a PTA rabbit hole, Paul Thomas Anderson rabbit hole.

00:02:59.540 | Same thing.

00:03:00.320 | You see him at Sundance Labs as a really young, really young filmmaker

00:03:04.520 | just surrounded by all of this talent to surround yourself by talent.

00:03:07.580 | If you're not, it's not going to work.

00:03:09.620 | And then when you write aim really high, does the other thing I picked up,

00:03:14.180 | even with screenwriters that you associate

00:03:19.020 | later on with this seems like a commercial blockbuster movie.

00:03:22.820 | So if we're thinking, I'm thinking JJ Abrams, maybe go back

00:03:25.680 | and think about John Milius.

00:03:28.220 | They were artistically really ambitious,

00:03:32.520 | and they were working on and they would work on scripts

00:03:34.780 | that were really stretches novelistic,

00:03:39.020 | literary, interesting nuance of character and pacing.

00:03:42.780 | Your your produced works are going to fall below where you're aiming.

00:03:48.120 | So if you come into the industry thinking like, how do I write an action movie

00:03:52.620 | like one I just saw, like a Marvel movie or something,

00:03:56.060 | you're going to fall below that standard and do nothing.

00:03:58.820 | But when you come into the industry with interesting artistic stuff,

00:04:01.460 | you show real skill.

00:04:03.060 | That is what is going to develop your skill.

00:04:05.260 | That's what's going to catch attention,

00:04:06.480 | even if the things you end up getting produced later are farther down the ladder.

00:04:10.060 | Now, 50 percent of what I'm saying here, Julian, might be nonsense.

00:04:13.380 | Again, I'm not in the movie industry.

00:04:15.780 | I did, though, have an interesting conversation once with

00:04:17.980 | the head of story at Paramount.

00:04:21.360 | So it was someone who doesn't write scripts,

00:04:23.660 | but helps develop all the scripts that Paramount is actually going to work on.

00:04:28.060 | And I learned a lot from that conversation.

00:04:29.920 | But basically, you have to be if you're going to succeed in screenwriting,

00:04:32.520 | people have to see you as having this spark, this artistic genius.

00:04:37.920 | Right. And then they're happy to have some with an artistic genius,

00:04:41.060 | you know, right.

00:04:41.980 | Take a hack at the next Guardian of the Galaxy franchise.

00:04:44.980 | But you got to you have to come in with this spark.

00:04:47.060 | So aim really high.

00:04:48.280 | Be very aspirational, very ambitious.

00:04:49.920 | Surround yourself with other artists.

00:04:51.320 | That's what matters.

00:04:52.360 | Whether you dropped out of college or not,

00:04:54.480 | doesn't matter for that specific thing.

00:04:56.280 | So that'd be my advice.

00:04:57.620 | How would you suggest that Julian balances it with his service industry job?

00:05:02.480 | Like, say, say he works some nights, he might work some doubles, stuff like that.

00:05:07.820 | I mean, go back and read a bunch of Tarantino oral histories.

00:05:13.060 | That's a good one. A lot of early interviews with Tarantino.

00:05:15.520 | Find out about how he was crafting his scripts

00:05:20.700 | when working at the famous was the video.

00:05:24.360 | What was it called?

00:05:25.920 | You said the video store.

00:05:27.860 | But I don't remember the exact name of the video store.

00:05:30.220 | I think that's a good example.

00:05:31.660 | Kevin Smith is another good example of people who were honing this skill

00:05:35.260 | while just working in a service industry.

00:05:37.560 | Tarantino is where I'm going to point you, actually, Julian,

00:05:39.500 | if you really want to see that what I'm talking about in action,

00:05:42.020 | because he was obsessed with film, obsessed with it, watching everything,

00:05:47.020 | tracking down where the weird prints were.

00:05:49.520 | This art house across town is playing, you know, some early Kurosawa there.

00:05:55.360 | You know, I want to see, you know, Hitchcock's rope,

00:05:57.860 | which is not really widely played,

00:06:00.060 | but there's maybe an interesting print happening over here.

00:06:02.060 | He was obsessed with film and that obsession with film drove it.

00:06:07.060 | He had a service industry job.

00:06:08.120 | He's working at a video store doing other odd jobs.

00:06:10.180 | And that's when he also started writing.

00:06:12.660 | By the way, look at Tarantino's rise.

00:06:14.720 | He did a lot of script work early on

00:06:17.580 | with some pretty major blockbuster type films.

00:06:22.220 | I'm blanking on what some of the names are now, but films

00:06:25.820 | you would remember from the early the mid 90s films

00:06:29.620 | that were just straight up like Nicolas Cage action films.

00:06:32.060 | He would call they would call him in to work on those things, which again shows.

00:06:35.380 | The writers who work are artistically ambitious.

00:06:40.260 | Even if not everything they work on itself is artistically ambitious.

00:06:42.860 | So use use Tarantino, I think, is a good case study.

00:06:45.700 | You're 20, you have energy.

00:06:47.900 | So if you get obsessed and let that obsession drive you.

00:06:50.660 | You can you have the time you have the time.

00:06:56.640 | [Music]

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Should I Quit College To Become A Better Screenwriter?

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